Aisles

The Homespun Sophisticate
Kooser's Latest is More than a "Field Book"

hould something subtitled “A Poet’s Field Book” be read critically? The question occurred to me while reading Ted Kooser’s The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book, and finding on its jacket the following:

Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year.

“Has filled scores of workbooks,” along with the dutiful acknowledgment of Kooser’s laurels, suggests something valedictory here, that this book serves as a glimpse into Kooser’s process, a look at some of his casual, unpolished notes, a volume that would perhaps be of interest primarily to other poets, who might read here with an eye toward noting differences between the language in the workbooks and what appears in Kooser's poems, and then extrapolating from those differences a sense of the kind of language-work Kooser does. “A sequence of contemplative prose observations,” however, suggests refinement, or at the very least some arrangement for effect. These are not just scrawlings, then, but formal fragments—if contemplative, then also contemplated, not just images noted in passing, but images captured, cleaned, polished, and presented.

So this isn’t something merely ceremonial, this is a book to be responded to—and yet it’s tricky to make demands of Kooser. His writing cannot be discussed without using the words Nebraska, spare, and elegiac. They appear in almost every review of his work, and apply to The Wheeling Year, as well. If you haven’t read Kooser, you should know that the word homespun also appears in discussions of his work.

The Wheeling Year is divided into twelve sections, each titled after a month, each containing between a dozen and two dozen short prose pieces. Take, for instance, this piece from the “April” section:

The twenty-five-cent photo booth has disappeared, poof, along with the fine-and-dimes they’d found a corner in, as with the boys and girls who stepped inside and drew the curtain, light as time, across their grins and mischief. Such fun it was to step out into the glaring light of the rest of your life, carrying your face as it had been framed for just that instant, your smile like a joke, the really good joke of a kisser as young as it would ever be again, frozen in black and white and damp with chemicals, fixed in a cold tin frame.

Fans of Kooser often take a defensive stance. The plainness of his language, his attention to capturing an image but not necessarily investigating it, the tone of Americana that seems to arrive naturally (is perhaps a synonym for) being from “the heartland”—his admirers often discuss his work in response to some kind of presumed attack against its lack of coastal sophistication. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find either of the coasts particularly sophisticated. The East Coast has a lot of bad sport coats and overdone makeup to answer for, and the West Coast has for decades been showing up to events in jeans and sandals that don’t always smell right. I’m not outraged that Ted Kooser doesn’t work psychoanalytic theory into his poems or essays, and neither am I upset that Kooser refuses to destabilize his aesthetics by googling “the heartland” as a first indeterminate step in producing a book of flarf. The quoted piece above is an elegy for twenty-five-cent photo booths. “Light as time” strikes me as nice, as does “glaring light of the rest of your life.” It’s an image, nicely drawn.

How you feel about the empty space after that previous sentence probably determines how you will feel about The Wheeling Year. Do you admire the craft of the nicely drawn, the writer’s eye for the selection of redolent images? Then The Wheeling Year is for you. But for those of you who, after that sentence, thought, “And...?”—well, that's it. There is a piece in the book about PBS painting icon Bob Ross. The piece is not a McSweeney’s-esque goof on Ross, it is not a critical mulling-over of how our culture created an “item” called “Bob Ross,” it is neither a celebration of Bob Ross nor a meta-celebration of our history of celebrating Bob Ross. “Come back, keep coming back, Bob Ross. We need to know that everything is happy where it is, and that we too might put it there,” the piece ends. Kooser is here to praise life, not to bury it. Well, these are elegiac pieces, so I guess he’s here to bury it, too. Kooser is here to praise life and bury it respectfully, and not to gossip about the rumors or try to be clever in the eulogy. People enjoyed Bob Ross. It would be nice if he were still around. End.

Though Kooser is undeniably talented at the observational, there are occasional false notes. A piece in the “May” section begins “Oh, melancholy, how poor I would be without you drawing my attention to this or that.” The formality of the address there gave me pause. I’m not sure people actually mired in melancholy begin their address to it with that anglophilic “Oh.” This is the note one picks up occasionally in Kooser—the sense that all this plainspokenness is sometimes the work of someone putting on a persona. That it is, in other words, crafted. It fits the project, though. That subtitle, “A Poet’s Field Book,” suggests a plainness of intent, a kind of mere transcription of some casual observations. Please. The Wheeling Year is more sophisticated than that.

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Alan Limnis is a staff writer. In the summer issue he reviewed Mina Loy's Insel.